#Linux Auto Installation

[virtualizationhowto]

iVentoy: Setup Network Boot of ISO Files Made Easy

iVentoy: Network Boot of ISO Files Made Easy #homelab #virtualizationhowto #iVentoy #NetworkBooting #BootISOFiles #ISOoverNetwork #LinuxAutoInstallation #WindowsAutoInstallation #PXEServerSetup #UEFIBoot #LegacyBIOSBoot #AutoOSInstallation

If you are like me, you used Rufus for years to “burn” ISO image files to a bootable USB drive. However, once I discovered Ventoy, I moved to using it for all my USB boot needs. It is a great tool, and we will talk about its advantages here. However, recently iVentoy was released that brings all the Ventoy goodness to network boot, which is great! Let’s look at iVentoy, the ultimate network boot…

[yesterdays-xkcd]

This really is a true story, and she doesn't know I put it in my comic because her wifi hasn't worked for weeks.

Cautionary [Explained]

Transcript Under the Cut

Linux: A True Story: [Cueball talks on a cell phone.] Week One: Phone: Hey, it's your cousin. I got a new computer but don't want Windows. Can you help me install "Linux"? Cueball: Sure.

[Cueball's cousin sits in an office chair with her laptop on her lap. She is on the phone.] Week Two: Cousin: It says my XORG is broken. What's an "XORG"? Where can I look that up? Cueball: Hmm, lemme show you man pages.

[Cueball's cousin crouches on the floor with the laptop on her lap. She is still on the phone.] Week Six: Cousin: Due to auto-config issues, I'm leaving Ubuntu for Debian. Cueball: Uh. Cousin: Or Gentoo. Cueball: Uh oh.

[Cueball's cousin lies on her stomach with the laptop on the floor. On the floor are several pieces of paper and a book. Cueball stands to her left.] Week Twelve: Cueball: You haven't answered your phone in days. Cousin: Can't sleep. Must compile kernel. Cueball: I'm too late.

[Box with text:] Parents: talk to your kids about Linux... Before somebody else does.

[liquidcrystalsky]

insanely controversial but as someone who daily drives linux i genuinely think that getting things from the Microsoft Store is the better option in most cases. you can use Winget to bypass having to use the actual app, but you Do Not need to be signed in either way.

Auto updates, standardized installation and uninstallation which is handled by the system rather than the progam itself. it's just good. think of any other device you use. your device installs a .dmg or an .apk or an .ipa or a .deb or whatever.

the proper way to install an app on windows is an ".appx" or ".msix" file. does anybody even know that. okay maybe because ".msi" files used to be used pretty often but. god it's the thing i dont understand about windows the most what do you mean you scour across the internet and download every app individually from different websites and run each installer individually. what is wrong with windows im sorry

[yaknowlikenyah]

My 3 days of Linux adventures

I figured out how to copy an iso onto a flashdrive to install linux and after realizing I was hitting the wrong BIOS menu button after a few hours of trial and error and a call to my more tech savvy sister

Started linux setup, got steam on there, realized how many of my games were windows only downloads, and proceeded to research for another couple hours how to get wine running and what front end to use because my computer has 3 gb of ram and I didn't trust that it could handle duel running OSs

Figure out there's literally a button for it in steam download options after which I say fuck it pass out and just reinstall linux the next morning hours faster than the first time I did.

Yay! Games installed!!

Download discord. Discord calls sound like I'm talking through a tin can on a landing strip no matter what settings I mess with. Assume it's something to do with the wifi cutting out. Investigate for hours to experiment with wifi power saving and settings and finally throw in the towel to talk to my sister again

My wifi despite showing two bars is actually faster than it's ever been and is downloading at ~100mbs. Give up for the night

Wake up the next morning to figure out what was fucking up, play around with mic settings and levels before finally reading a forum post from two years ago talking about window's auto installed noise cancellation drivers.

Resign myself to either needing to buy an external mic that's not right next to my computer's half broken fan, or needing to download specific noise canceling drives from github

Struggle with figuring out how to run shit from github for an hour

Resign myself to the external mic pt 2, try to boot up my favorite little rpgmaker puzzle game and it runs like a slideshow. This is my limit. I need my little mimic chest puzzle.

Begin researching again. Learn about more drivers I could potentially try installing or the much simpler method of just dual booting (computer has no ram. She's so old you guys)

Finally throw in the towel completely and decide to unfortunately switch back to Windows10. Download the iso accidentally and struggle around with getting it on the usb before getting the rar I need and the program to reformat the usb to take it (thank you ventoy) and struggle to download it while making sense of tutorials

Try to boot it. Fail.

What the fuck is a partition

Finally realized at this point that the prefix 'Sudo' in ubuntu is the command to run from root. That wouldve been nice to know

Finally delete partitions, run windows and get it reinstalled.

Honestly a 10/10 experience had a blast would do again

[certified-anti-microsoft-posts]

I'll be so real with you, I've been thinking of switching to Linux but I know there's less compatibility & I am a goofy bloke who wants his programs, but seeing as there's nooo way I'm switching to W11 I might do it if I ever have to give up my W10.

There is surprisingly a lot of compatibility with modern programs (excluding Adobe products, those can work on Linux, but the process is very involved and jank) it depends on what your needs are. Many people tend to look into Linux mint as their first distro since it emulates the feeling of Windows and it's comfortable to try out.

Good news though, if you're a gamer, there's never been a better time to game on Linux; Valve has been putting a lot of work into interoperability for Windows games on Linux, through Steam Proton (free for steam users btw, and auto installs and configures for you!). I personally installed Ubuntu on an old Mac chassis, and now it's a Balatro machine 😂

If you do make the switch, best of luck and remember to have fun!

[specterofyou]

Having a Moment. Since switching to Linux, none of my art programs have worked (even following guides to get Clip Studio Paint installed didn't work...) and all my attempts at making new sprites (in MyPaint and in Krita) has resulted in failure. I tried to use an old spare tablet I had laying around, but none of my Clip Studio Paint brushes/auto actions carried over AND pen pressure doesn't work with the pen I bought.

I'm tired lol... my only resort now is making The Rewritten Journal and Trick Thrice in Aseprite, though they'll look wildly different than how they're supposed to...

[sunny-day-jack-official]

Will updates for Sleepy Time Jack auto-update? Or will I have to download the new version each time?

Hi there! It depends on what OS version of the game you're playing. If you're playing one of the desktop versions (Windows, Macintosh, Linux), you can have the game auto-update when you install it through the itch.io app launcher. If you're playing on Android, unfortunately you'll have to manually download each new update to sideload it. Apologies for the inconvenience!

[cindysimblr]

Beautiful <3

For anyone interested, it was actually somewhat simple (after trying to get it to work for months...

For anyone interested: I downloaded Linux for Steam (also works with Lutris): https://github.com/kevinlekiller/reshade-steam-proton

as described. I actually used the newest Reshade version. It auto-detected that the Sims 2 is a 32 bit game and correctly installed everything. Then I went to the game folder and renamed d3d9.dll to d3d9.asi and put that file into my RPC mods files. That was it!

To get the depth functions to work, I used this tutorial, again.

I haven't played for longer times yet, so it's absolutely possible that the game is more prone to crashes this way. Let's see. I also need to make some more thief-ish Reshade templates.

[sanjubaba123]

Elevate Your Business with Affordable Efficiency: A Comprehensive Guide to Cheap Linux VPS

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[bjsmall]

2023

Ice Age 2 The Meltdown game.

On the 31st July 2023, I installed Ice Age 2: The Meltdown onto my system to test-run it on Microsoft's Windows 11.

I connected a portable Liteon DVD-ROM optical drive to my Mini-PC to install it using the 2 CD discs.

Here is a picture of me with the game box!

Ice Age 2: The Meltdown, based on Blue Sky Studios 2006 film of the same name, was developed by Eurocom and published by Vivendi Universal Games (Sierra Entertainment).

The game works on the latest versions of Windows and also works on Linux using Wine (PlayOnLinux).

I put Disc 1 in first and opened the auto-run from the disc. I clicked the 'Install Ice Age 2: The Meltdown' option from the list. The game uses InstallShield software to install itself onto Windows. I switched the discs around towards the end of the install. Once it had finished installing onto the system, I chose to launch the game.

After going through the intros, I pressed the enter key to go to the main menu. Firstly before starting the game, I configured my favourite keyboard layout. Afterwards I then started a new game and selected a save game slot (Slot A).

As I was playing Ice Age 2, I got to the Forest 2 stage, shortly after going through this stage, Windows 11 asked if I wanted to run the game in 'Compatibility Mode', I chose to run the game with this. It offered this as it knew the game application running was intended for an older version of Windows. However compatibility mode didn't work and the game crashed to the desktop.

The app process name for the game is 'IceAge2pc.exe' (32-bit) when running. The CD (Disc 1) is required to play the game.

I re-launched the game and had to re-configure everything and start from the beginning again, however the game seemed to work much better without running it in the legacy mode Windows offered.

I tried again and successfully played the game up to the end of the Maelstrom level, completing this stage which in my opinion is the best level in the game! Here are the in-game pictures I took with the camera of some of the stages. I had to use HDR camera effect for some of the pictures. The levels shown in the pictures are the Waterpark, Forest, Ice River and Maelstrom.

I had to use my camera for the pictures as the game doesn't allow for print-screening due to Windows copy protection. When running Ice Age 2 in windowed mode, if you click out of the game it will darken the game screen and pause everything until you click on it again.

The game defaults to a screen resolution of 640x480, so I changed it to the maximum resolution of 1024x768. Interestingly the game didn't scale to full screen as when I tried it previously on another PC running Windows 10, but stretched to fit the screen instead. This was because of the 'Gaming Mode' function which is enabled in Windows 10. This mode is disabled by default in Windows 11 and the game worked perfectly without it. However, the game always runs in the 4.3 aspect ratio, but uses a fisheye lens effect which defaults to the 16.9 aspect ratio, so changing that fixed the gaming experience on this monitor. You can read more about display settings for the game in my write-up.

Audio played through my Mini-Rig Bluetooth speaker, which sounded great! The game uses a stereo sound set-up, which can act as surround through headphones.

Back in 2020, Dad gave me a copy of the Ice Age 2: The Meltdown video game which he found on eBay. I did a detailed review of the game and an unboxing review.

See my reviews in the links below:

There are a number of cheat codes you can enter in the pause menu, these include unlocking all the bonus content and the ability to unlock the 'Level Select' menu, plus more.

See all the cheat codes for the game here:

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/pc/931239-ice-age-2-the-meltdown/cheats

Playlist featuring all the levels:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLyj4UFt4ma4_XQ0RZ3FjpFZAa7jvjhPc9

A link to the complete in-game music composed by Jim Croft:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLO4jlmGoc6uDm0QVLyMqURTP2ciHWjCF_

Overall despite being 17 years old, running the game on Windows 11 worked a treat! It was great fun playing Ice Age 2: The Meltdown again as it is fun, humorous and challenging. Its music is memorable, vibrant and colourful just like its movie soundtrack!

However, I think that both Ice Age 2: The Meltdown (2006) and its Activision sequel Ice Age 3: Dawn of the Dinosaurs (2009) should be made available as a digital download through game distribution services such as Valves Steam alongside Ice Age: Scrat's Nutty Adventure (2019) to keep them running into the future without the need for a disc.

For a full list of all the Ice Age video-games see:

https://iceage.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_Ice_Age_video_games

See my video below. See videos underneath for the in-game bosses and also bosses in Scrat's Nutty Adventure on YouTube.

Scroll down to see my write-up on Cretaceous and Maelstrom!

[golmac]

Inform 7 Basics Continued (#4)

About rooms: making a room is a big deal! I don't mean this in terms of craft, or writing, or programming. Those are all big deals, it's true, but I mean that a room is all that Inform needs to compile a story. Seriously! Just type

Lab is a room.

in the IDE (development application available for Linux, Windows, and MacOS) and click the "go" button. You have a fully operational, releasable story (Inform programs are called "stories). Release it, and open it in an interpreter (a VM application for running Inform stories) or publish it to the web!

Now, it won't be an interesting game, mind you, but it shows how robust that built-in command support is with the typical Inform 7 IDE installation. Thanks to some pre-installed extensions (out in the programming world, these are comparable to code libraries), there are a ton of default actions that a player can perform in this lab. The largest and most important of these is the Standard Rules. This code (and code for other extensions) is not a black box; it can be viewed at any time.

Conveniently, compiling a game also builds something called the "Index", which is a graphical, hyperlinked reference containing all defined actions, an auto-generated map of the game world, and lots of other stuff. The index grows as your project grows. It is an Index of your story, including built-in code from extensions like the Standard Rules. That's not all. It has hyperlinks to the relevant code in your story. All you need is a room to get started.

Making a room is a big deal.

But what about making rooms? Programmers typically use the room name "Lab" for test situations. It's short, for one thing, and labs are good places for experimenting. So, again, this is the code:

Lab is a room.

Now, as nice as it is to have a working story with an index, people expect rooms to be described.

Lab is a room. The description of Lab is "The organization's magnetic propulsion lab focuses primarily on railgun technology."

There is more than one way to phrase this, but I like keeping things on separate lines for readability. I think that a key feature of Inform 7 is that it can be very readable. Even inexperienced programmers (like me) can follow a lot of Inform 7 code.

OK. We now have a room description and a story we can compile. What else? Well, "lab" is convenient for us to type, but players might appreciate something more interesting. We change this pretty easily:

The printed name of lab is "Magnetic Propulsion Laboratory".

What if we want more than one room?

Lab is north of the Annex.

This automatically creates a room called "Annex". We can type "SOUTH" or "S" and the command prompt and walk there from the lab. Unless we tell it differently, Inform 7 will automatically assume that we can walk from the Annex to the Lab by typing "NORTH" or "N". As promised, the beginnings of a map appear in the Index. Note the orange links, which jump to the places where the rooms are defined in code.

Since Inform 7 is optimized for designing parser games, beginners can immediately jump in and start creating and designing the story's geography.

Sample Code:

Lab is a room. The printed name of Lab is "Magnetic Propulsion Laboratory". The description of Lab is "The organization's magnetic propulsion lab focuses primarily on railgun technology.".

Lab is north of the Annex. The printed name of the Annex is "Magnetic Development Storage". The description of the Annex is "This is a general storage area for equipment related to railgun technology development.".

Output:

Welcome An Interactive Fiction Release 1 / Serial number 230607 / Inform 7 v10.1.2 / D

Magnetic Propulsion Laboratory The organization's magnetic propulsion lab focuses primarily on railgun technology.

>s

Magnetic Development Storage This is a general storage area for equipment related to railgun technology development.

>n

Magnetic Propulsion Laboratory The organization's magnetic propulsion lab focuses primarily on railgun technology.

Next time: things.

[kotodama-catalogue]

i've been on a linux adventure recently —

one day i woke up and thought, "today is the day", and began working through the linux from scratch handbook. it turns out that most people do not in fact do this on bare metal because compiling everything yourself and just punting on package management does not provide for a workable system. at least, not as a daily driver. (this guy tried writing a debian from scratch where step 1 is getting apt going, but apparently it is not just outdated, but incorrect even at the version specified).

you're supposed to just do this in a virtual machine and treat it like a learning exercise. i did not do this, and spent twelve hours compiling all the packages and walking circular dependency trees basically trying to slowly divorce yourself from the host system's toolchain.

in the process it's very clear how "down in the dirt" linux as a whole is; nothing is made for each other, all the packages are just picked up from here and there, sometimes the maintainer doesn't update their domain and pkg-conf is just Gone so you have to dig it out of the gentoo repo. i kind of love it. it feels organic, it feels natural. of course this emerged. of course it all kinda works, of course it all fails easily.

it's a lot like the human body. that is, say you have a really nicely integrated distro. they probably have like fifty different upstreams, and teams that are making extensions or monkey patching the upstream as they go to slowly hone these disparate things into stuff that vaguely resembles each other. you introduce redundancies and reliability checks. you try to migrate to stuff that will enforce this (Ubuntu enforces Wayland by default; Fedora defaults you to btrfs; downstream distributions then in turn undo some of these like how Pop! OS goes back to X11).

you keep reinforcing against common failures with subsequent processes that can watch for those failures and prevent them, provide fallbacks, self-heal if possible.

and then in turn for everything else you isolate its ability to even impact the core system. ideally you're immutable — say, vanilla os, or some people use nix or fedora silverblue. but most of the time there's just a hybrid approach where we sandbox as much as we can. steam os completely replaces the OS every update and keeps the home folder. chromebooks do likewise. macos has been doing this since i think el capitan? and apfs is intended to have a less hacked-in way of providing for a core system partition that nothing else can touch.

that whole thing is really beautiful, i think — have BSDs replicated this? i don't know; i have never used one very seriously. it felt like they intended to start from scratch with a monolithic basis, but it feels like i'm in the early 2000s again when i try to debug a bsd system and look for documentation.

anyway, so after twelve hours i fumbled a very basic thing. that is, i assumed, why not? i will use UEFI, but i had already partitioned as if i was doing an MBR. so i tried to add a UEFI partition and inadvertently, in trying to unmount and safely perform this operation, rebooted into a system that was freaking out because there was no UEFI partition. it kept reboot cycling into a wifi recovery agent and occasionally realising there was a USB attached.

i moved to arch and performed the entire install in like less than an hour. but damn it, now i'm frustrated. i wanted to see this through. today i decided to move to fedora to better have an overarching experience for this specific hardware (the auto-rotation and on screen keyboard support is amazing on gnome 44) and then try to throw all this into a Box and do it again. but given so much of this was tedious, i would probably just ... automate it. but aren't we getting too close to just a distro?

[jaymes-baker]

General Device Maintenance for Windows

It is common for people to think they need a new laptop or desktop after a few years of use, and it is running slow. However, I’m going to show you a few tricks that I have perfected over the years to help a machine run in tip top shape. These are especially great to do after you have been uninstalling and reinstalling video games on them or just general use from office activity. These are, in my professional experience, the General Maintenance your company should be running on their Windows machines once a year, but probably is not…

-Work Machine-

Please note that for any commands I’m referencing to with quotes, you will not enter the quotes, it’s just the industry standard when specifying a string of data. We’ve all been there, on a work machine and it’s locked down on the permissions. Great news, you can run “gpupdate /force” (Group Policy Update) from Command Prompt. It’s pretty fast and either works or gives you an error that you can screenshot and send to your Service Desk, saving a ton of time. Fundamentally what it does is checks with your company’s server to make sure your computer follows the parameters of the domain. It’s typically the first thing your IT person will run and can be done with any account.

-Personal Machine-

If you haven’t already done it, you should uninstall any Bloatware. This is software that came on your computer when you got it, you don’t necessarily need or use it and it doesn’t seem to contribute to how your computer runs the way you are going to use it. Navigate to the “uninstall a program” area of your Control Panel and you will see the list, then just right click > uninstall (sometimes with stuff like Office there is a “Repair” option). If you see “Wave Browser” while in the control panel you will want to get rid of that at once and run a malware scan; actually, if you see any program you don’t recognize, Google it and/or the publisher to check that it’s legitimate or see what it does. (Note: modern browsers have Java built in, you no longer need it installed on your machine.) You may also have to do it from what we used to call the “Start” area and have no idea why they changed it, er the windows icon and “All Apps”.

-Light Clean-

Clearing your temp folders might seem like it’s not that important, but the closer your SSD drive gets to 50% the slower it performs. This is the random cache your computer stores during regular use of moving files, installing programs, error logs…etc. You’d be surprised at just how junked up they can get, I’ve seen them take up to 8GB worth of data.

From any account: Go to start > Run and type in “%temp%”. (The actual path is “C:\Users\\AppData\Local\Temp”)

With administrative rights, follow the same steps but instead type “temp”.(“C:\Windows\Temp”)

-Update Drivers-

If it’s not one thing, it’s the drivers. Easiest way you can check is to look for a caution mark on one of the listed items in the Device Manger; you might have to drop down the tree. These are the kernel code that binds your operating system and programs with the motherboard. You can set them to auto update, but sometimes the list doesn’t synchronize. Some laptops such as Lenovo have a program that you can download from their website or find in the Microsoft Store like “Lenovo Vantage” and it can be ran from a user account. If you want to look for them yourself the command is: “wmic bios get serialnumber”. The top two to look for and download if they have a newer version are the BIOS and Firmware/Chipset Management Engine.

-More in Depth Commands-

(You will need administrative rights)

Similar to Linux there are terminal commands that are native to the Windows environment that you can run to improve your system. To run these, go to start > Command Prompt > right click > run as administrator:

#1 System File Checker = "sfc /scannow"

This one will take roughly 10 minutes but it’s safe to use the machine while it runs; however, I wouldn’t install anything while it goes. It basically goes through your filesystem and makes sure everything lines up the way it should be, the right system files point to the correct location and there’s no junk files that shouldn’t be there linking to something else. This is just layman’s term, and feel free to look into it more but I assure you it’s perfectly fine to run even if you don’t know what you’re doing.

#2 DISM = "dism /online /cleanup-image /restorehealth"

It can take 15 to 45 minutes, depending on how bad your machine is, but again it’s safe to use while it runs. This connects with the Microsoft servers responsible for updates and ensures that your operating systems image matches the lines of code it should have. You can actually do a lot with dism commands.

#3 Check Disk = "chkdsk /f /r /x" (stands for: find, repair, dismount)

Please note that you will not be able to use the machine until it’s finished running and it can take up to an hour. It should automatically restart your machine after entering it so make sure to save and close everything beforehand. It sometimes gets stuck at “100%, please do not turn off or restart your machine”, but it’s safe to hard reset (press the power button or pull cord). This checks your hard drive for any irregularities and makes sure nothing is corrupt or damaged. There are several ways to run this, however this is the one I find most useful as it runs it at a very low level right after bios when it is loading the kernel (code that makes hardware talk to software).

#4 Cipher = "cipher /w:c:\"

This one will take a while, like up to 2 hours, and I wouldn’t plan on using it, so it goes faster. For when you drastically want to really clean your hard drive to sell or donate This command wipes the dark void of the strange quarks files turn into after the recycling bin. Basically, preventing anyone from restoring anything you deleted and maximizing the free space available in some parts per million way. — And that’s pretty much it! There are a few snazzy programs that I will leave below to help keep your computer stay in shape and safe. Other than that, Congratulations!!! You could be an entry level IT person now.

Noteworthy programs: ATF Cleaner, JRT Remover, Glary Utilities, CCleaner and Malwarebytes

[hydrus]

Version 619

windows

zip

exe

macOS

app

linux

tar.zst

I had a good week. There's a mix of several sorts of work, and duplicates auto-resolution gets more tools.

Your client is going to clean its tags on update. If you have a lot of tags (e.g. you sync with the PTR), it will take twenty minutes or more to complete.

full changelog

Linux build

The Linux build had a problem last week at the last minute. Github retired the old runner, and I missed the news. I have rolled out a test build that uses 22.04 instead of 20.04, and several users report that the build boots, does not seem to need a clean install, and may even fix some things.

If you use the Linux build, please update as normal this week. If the build does not boot, please try doing a clean install, as here: https://hydrusnetwork.github.io/hydrus/getting_started_installing.html#clean_installs

If today's release does not work at all, not even a fresh extract to your desktop, please let me know the details. If this happens to you, you might like to consider running from source, which solves many Linux OS-compatibility problems: https://hydrusnetwork.github.io/hydrus/running_from_source.html

I've now got a job to check for runner news in future, so this sudden break shouldn't happen again.

misc work

AVIF rendering broke last week, sorry! Should be fixed now, but let me know if it sometimes still fails for you.

I updated the tag-cleaning filter to remove many weird unicode characters like 'zero-width space' that slips in usually because of a bad decode or parse or copy-paste transliteration. On update, your client will scan all of its tags for 'invalid tags', renaming anything bad that it finds. If you sync with the PTR, this will take at least twenty minutes and will likely discover 30,000+ invalid tags--don't worry too much about it. If you want to see exactly what it found, it logs everything.

If you use sidecars for export, I moved the hardcoded 'sort results before sending them out' job to the string processor that's actually in each sidecar. Every sidecar will get this new processing step on update. They work as they did before, but if you do want the results sorted in a particular different way, you can now change it.

duplicates auto-resolution

I had success adding more tools to duplicates auto-resolution. You can now do "A has at least 2x the num_pixels as B" comparisons for some basic metadata types, and also say "A and B have/do not have the same filetype".

I have enabled all the UI and added two new suggested rules for clearing out some pixel-perfect duplicates. If you have been following along, please check these out and let me know what you think. I do not recommend going crazy here, but if you are semi-automatic, I guess you can try anything for fun.

Odd bug I've just noticed while playing around: sometimes, after editing existing rules, the list stops updating numbers for that edited rule. Closing and opening a new duplicates processing page fixes it. I'll fix it properly for next week.

Next step, so we can push beyond pixel-perfect duplicates, is to figure out a rich similarity-measuring tool that lets us automatically differentiate alternates from duplicates. I'm thinking about it!

next week

I might try this 'A is > 99.7% similar to B' tech for duplicates auto-resolution. I've got some IRL that might impact my work schedule in a couple weeks, so I'll otherwise just do some small jobs.

[elfwreck]

not calling out anyone here - these are sentiments I have seen before. And I get it. I'm a power user of Windows, and Microsoft is awful and Windows gets worse every year (damn I miss WinXP's search functions so much...) but for a lot of us - Linux is not better.

Less invasive, sure. Less loaded with bloatware. More customizable.

But those features are only useful if the computer also does what you expect your computer to do, and "customizable" is only useful if you understand the options and how to set them.

Virtual box is weird and complicated and does not integrate well with the rest of the computer. (And a daughter who plays Genshin, which I gather is difficult, although maybe not impossible, to do in a virtual box.)

I would definitely need a virtual box; I'm a power-user of programs that have no Linux versions, including Adobe Acrobat Pro. (If you want to convince me there's a good Linux alternative, talk to me about its bookmark and form field editing features.)

Damn I hate having to download & install an update for Discord every couple of days. (I know there's an interface or wrapper or something that will let it auto-update. It takes more space on the disc, which my Linux laptop doesn't have to spare.)

Cannot find my files in Linux. I'm sure they're organized in some much-more-logical way - but the point is, I don't know that way, and don't want to spend a few months being frustrated with the system trying to get used to it.

My job is Windows-based. Cannot stop using Windows; could only shift to "and ALSO use some different system when not at work."

Linux often has tech-support issues - there are very few purchase-new Linux laptops, and the rest often have issues like "must manually install these drivers from a flash drive before your laptop will recognize the internet."

A large portion of the Linux community is hostile to Windows users. Answers to tech questions on forums often include comments like "if you don't have the technical details of the software and OS you're using, you're doing it wrong. Go away and come back when your question is coherent." ...Which does not help a person searching their phone trying to find answers to "why does my new-Linux install not connect to the internet?"

There is no Switch From Windows To Linux website, forum, or support community. There are several Linux options (...several hundred, but we'll limit it to the half-dozen often recommended to newbies), and there's no coherent pros & cons lists, because the people recommending them don't understand what people get out of Windows well enough to make those lists. Microsoft comes with free tech support for new purchases. If your laptop or desktop isn't working correctly when you start it, or there's issues like "sound keeps shutting off," you can contact them, and they will walk you through the problems. (Or, will troubleshoot and say "you have a hardware issue; sorry; I can't help.") There is no equivalent for Linux... there's "visit some forums, in which you can find advice for your problem dating back to 1993; try to find something recent because the old advice probably involves software pieces that no longer exist."

I gather that Linux is terrific for coders, for programmers. Maybe for sysadmins. However, for office workers & students, it's not better, just not full of adware.

That is a good feature! That is a GREAT feature!

...that is not enough of a feature to give up the software that doesn't have Linux support, nor to have to learn a new OS that isn't what most jobs & schools use.

(Want to fix that? Set up a How And Why To Switch website and be welcoming and friendly to clueless newbies who will ask things like "does Linux work for Facebook?" and "how do I get to my photos on Linux?" Because until that exists, Windows is going to dominate the office spaces; schools are slowly being ceded to Google's Chromebooks.)

(For actual would-be Linux newbies: My #1 bit of advice is choose a password that you don't mind typing. A lot. There are people who claim you can Linux without the terminal - without command-line instructions. I assume they are not lying, but they are not talking about the Linux most of us are stuck working with. #2 advice is, when you search for answers online, limit the results to the past year.)

A boy can dream, can't he?